Dark City (Repairman Jack - Early Years 02) (33 page)

“Okay, true. But what else?”

“I got no machines.”

“I can fix that.”

His eyebrows rose. “Yeah? How you fix that?”

Jack considered that. He had a feeling Rico would never hear of borrowing money from him, but a third party … who just happened to be Latino …

“I know this guy named Julio who’ll lend you the money to buy what you need to get started.”

“How I pay back?”

“A little at a time, whenever you can. He’ll be in no hurry. He has the soul of a saint. He lives to help people.” Don’t laugh here, he told himself—do
not
laugh. “You start with one helper. You’ve got Carlos, Juan, and Ramon—one of them can leave Giovanni and come with you. And you don’t need much: an old truck, a used riding mower for you, a push mower, some rakes and shovels, and you’re in business.”

Rico wanted to work. Jack had no doubt that once he got moving, he’d keep rolling.

Rico said, “How—?”

A gunshot, near deafening within the garage’s concrete walls, made the three of them jump. One of the DDPers had piled up a couple of empty wooden crates and fired the Semmerling into them. He was pulling the trigger, trying to fire a second shot, to no avail. He pulled back on the slide but it wouldn’t budge—because it slid forward on the Semmerling.

Jack jumped up. The sudden movement gave him a sick, dizzy feeling, intensifying the throbbing in his head.

“
Ten cuidado
,” he heard Rico say in a low voice.

Be careful … yeah, Jack would be careful. But he needed his Semmerling back.

He shuffled over to the group. “¿Qué pasa?”

The shooter sneered and tossed the pistol to Jack.
“¡El juguete está roto!”

El juguete?
He wasn’t sure about that word. Toy? Your toy is broken.

That fit. The Semmerling was small enough to be a toy—certainly not macho enough for these studs. And because it looked like a semiauto, the guy expected it to self-load like one. Jack didn’t get into explaining its manual repeating double action.

He put on a sad expression.
“Sí, está roto.”

The DDPers laughed as he walked back toward Rico and Bonita. He spotted his ankle holster on the floor and picked it up along the way.

“How’d you get involved with these clowns?” he said when he rejoined Rico.

He shrugged. “We’re all from the same country. Their attitude is, you hurt one Dominican, you hurt all Dominicans. They said they’d help me find you. They spotted you today and remembered you from last week, so when you sit in the park, they grab you.” He looked at the Semmerling. “They broke it?”

Jack shook his head. “Nah. They just don’t know how to use it.”

Rico smiled. “You sneaky man, Jack. I think you dangerous.”

Jack rubbed his aching jaw. Not dangerous enough, it seemed. Not by a long shot.

13

Vinny smiled as he spotted the dozen high rollers waiting at the usual spot under the street light on Mott Street. Then frowned at what he saw behind them: yet another bright yellow awning with red Chinese lettering hanging over the sidewalk where an Italian bakery used to be. Damn chinks. If this kept up, no one would be able to call the place Little Italy anymore.

He pulled his van into the curb and Aldo followed directly behind.

The gamblers split their number between the two vehicles. As soon as the side door slid shut, Vinny got rolling.

“Where we going tonight?” one of the familiar faces said as Vinny made a left on Canal Street.

“Brooklyn.” In response to a couple of groans, he added, “Settle back and relax. Traffic’s light. This won’t take long.”

His passengers were a special breed of craps player. They could ride down to Atlantic City for legal action, but they liked to stay local and play the Gambino tables. The New York families had different rules for craps that these guys preferred.

Tonight the games were set up in Tony the Cannon’s old social club on Avenue J. The locations were chosen randomly, never the same one twice in a row—hence the “floating crap game” moniker—and none of the players was given advance notice. The cops loved to break up the games when they could, and they took “break up” to the limit: They rounded everybody up then reduced the roulette and craps tables to splinters before they left. So secrecy was a primo concern.

Tommy, as senior soldier, helped Tony run the games when they were at his club. The rule from the bosses: keep the games honest when the regulars were involved. These regulars were valuable customers who generated a lot of action. The family made good, steady money off the games and the ponies without rigging anything, and so they wanted these high rollers back again and again.

Vinny didn’t mind playing chauffeur. The family bosses bankrolled the games and thirty percent of the take went to the operator—in this case, Tony. Some of that would go to Vinny. Easy money with no risk.

But it still didn’t get Tommy Ten Thumbs out of his hair.

14

“Ooh, Jack,” Lou said as Jack took a seat at the bar. “What happened to your face?”

Jack looked at himself in the bar mirror and winced. Nose swollen, a blue-black ring under his left eye. No wonder people had been staring at him on his trip here.

Julio looked up from drying a glass and smiled. “How the other guy look?”

“Perfectly fine, unfortunately.”

Julio poured a Rolling Rock and set it before him. Jack stared at it, considered his persistently throbbing head, and decided to drink anyway. Beer cured just about everything.

“What the hell happened to you?” Barney said, returning from one of his frequent trips to the men’s room.

“Long story. Hey, Julio. Can you do me a favor?”

“Like?”

“Help this guy I know get set up in a landscaping business.”

He laughed. “You kidding, right? I don’t know shit about that stuff.” He pointed to the dead plants in the window. “Ain’t that proof?”

Yeah, proof of willful neglect.

“That’s not the point. You know how to talk business. His English isn’t too good and you can help him get a good price.”

“Me?”

“I hear you talking to suppliers. You know how to pinch a penny.”

“Till it screams for mercy,” Lou said with a grin.

“He’s got the money?”

“No, I do. But he’ll think
you’re
lending it to him, interest free. Can’t know it’s me.”

Julio stared at him. “What is it with you? You don’t like money?”

“I love money. If I had enough I’d fill a ten-story bin with cash, install a diving board, and swim around in it.”

“Then why you always trying to give it away?”

“Hey, Jack,” said Barney. “If you’re giving out cash—”

Julio waved him to silence. “Seriously, Jack. You got some kinda Mother Teresa thing goin’ on in your head?”

“Naw. This is for me. This guy … we’ve got an unbalanced scale between us. I’ll feel better if it’s leveled out. You’ll help?”

“He’s a Rican?”

“No. From the DR.”

Julio made a face. “Not one of those DDPers you were talking about.”

“No. This guy’s straight. Just needs a break is all.”

“All right. I help. But I still don’t get it.”

Jack did. A guy who had wanted to put a major hurt on him would now owe him. The turnaround meant he could stop looking over his shoulder. Not only that, having a guy like Rico owing him a favor was better than money in the bank.

He changed the subject.

“You gonna be ready Saturday morning for Zalesky watching?”

Julio made a fist. “Hey, I hope we gonna do more that just watch.”

“Only time will tell, my friend. Only time will tell.”

THURSDAY

1

Kadir dropped into the passenger seat and left the car door open. He took slow, deep breaths to calm his quaking stomach. The car was parked behind the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office in Hauppauge. He’d just returned from the morgue within and had feared he might vomit as he crossed the parking lot.

Sheikh Omar had sent him and Mahmoud here to identify the fallen so they might have proper Muslim burials. Mahmoud had known most of them, having trained many in the use of the AK-47, but not all. Ghali and Ramiz had been among them—both Kadir and Mahmoud knew those two—but Mahmoud had never met Rashad and Tariq. Kadir knew them from the mosque, and so he had been sent along to identify them.

His stomach quailed at the memory of their remains—torn by the explosion, charred by the fire from the exploding gas tank, barely recognizable. All he could think of as he’d gazed at the looks of agony frozen on their scorched faces was
that could have been me.

After identifying the four bodies he knew, he’d signed the papers and fled to the car, leaving Mahmoud behind. Mahmoud would take longer since he had more to identify. Eventually the bodies would have to be claimed. By tradition, relatives would wash the body, wrap it in a white cloth, say the funeral prayer, then bury it. But some of the fallen had no family here. What would happen to their remains? Sharia forbade cremation.

Kadir jumped as the driver door opened and Mahmoud slipped behind the wheel.

“You look terrible,” he said in Arabic. “Don’t get sick. You are already in enough trouble.”

He needed no reminder that this was the car that ferried Sheikh Omar around. Nor that he was in trouble.

But it wasn’t fair.

Yesterday he had had to suffer the wrath of Sheikh Omar alone. Reggie wasn’t a Muslim and hadn’t been available anyway. The man from Qatar was not a member of the congregation. And Mahmoud … Mahmoud had simply driven the man from Qatar to the ambush site.

Sheikh Omar had no one else upon whom to vent his rage, and so Kadir had borne the brunt of it. Kadir had had nothing to do with the renting of the truck, and had not driven it at all, yet somehow he was at fault because a bomb had been attached to it.

That same attitude seemed to prevail at the mosque and the refugee center. His fellow Muslims looked at him strangely, as if he somehow could have prevented the deaths of their friends, or at the very least have had the decency to be martyred along with them.

“Didn’t that turn your stomach?”

Mahmoud shrugged. “I saw much worse in Afghanistan.”

Mahmoud had been combat trained in Peshawar and served among the mujahideen against the Russians during the war. He never let anyone forget it.

“Besides,” he added, “they’re with their eternally virginal houris.”

Sheikh Omar had declared all of those killed yesterday as martyrs to jihad, thus assuring them of a heavenly reward. The blind cleric loved to quote the
Tafsir
of Al-Suyuti. Kadir had heard it so many times he knew it by heart.

“Each time we sleep with a houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each Chosen One will marry seventy houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetizing vaginas.”

By some strange quirk of fate, Kadir had been denied such eternal pleasures. Not that he wished to have ended like those he had identified just now.

“What happened, Kadir?” Mahmoud said as he started the car. “How did that bomb get there?”

Kadir had been expecting the question, and had been surprised Mahmoud had not asked it on the drive out. He had asked himself the same a thousand times since yesterday morning.

“I do not know.”

“As I see it, there are but two possibilities: Either it was already attached when you picked up the truck from Aimal Kasi, or it was attached later. I have since spoken to Kasi. He says no one knew where he was going to rent the truck because he decided at the last minute. The U-Haul place he went to first did not have the right size available. He swears he never left the truck unattended.”

“Neither did we,” Kadir said.

But he knew that wasn’t true. After the police stop, he and Reggie had gone together to the phones. It could have happened then. But how could he admit that he left the truck? Fortunately Reggie was not available to contradict him. The lapse made what had subsequently happened all Kadir’s fault. Ghali, Ramiz, Rashad, Tariq, and the rest, all dead because he had not wanted to bother to stay with the truck.

“But here is something interesting,” Mahmoud said. “Kasi said he told you about a suspicious man who asked directions but seemed to be looking over the truck.”

“Yes. That was why we rushed off immediately.”

“Well, he says he saw the same man race past on your tail right after you and the American left.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?”

“How?”

Yes. How? If only they had had one of those mobile phones.

“Reggie, the American, thought we were being followed on the way south but the car turned off and he never saw it again. We didn’t see who was inside.”

“This man was driving a pickup truck.”

Kadir shook his head. “We saw so many pickup trucks along the way. Was he young with brown hair? Could it be the one at the shooting range I’d seen at Tachus’s uncle’s place?”

“The one we knocked off the motorcycle?” Mahmoud shook his head. “According to Kasi, this man was older with short gray hair.”

“There’s a man like that who still deals with Riaz Diab, the uncle. I wonder…”

“Could the American with you have done it?”

“Reggie? I cannot see why or how. Besides, he would have been in the truck with me had not the man from Qatar told us to ride with him.”

“The man from Qatar,” Mahmoud said, shaking his head. “What do we know of him—besides that he seems devoted to the cause of jihad?”

Kadir wondered too. “Yes, he seems willing to help, but only when it profits him.”

“I thought so too. But he arrived early today and donated the bounty he had promised for capture of the hijackers, even though they escaped.”

Kadir blinked in surprise. That seemed out of character. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I have been thinking about something else he said: He’s heard rumors that the FBI and CIA are involved.”